Meredith Kercher case

[Garry Wroe]

That's a fair point, Ally. But then, the Kerchers couldn't afford to attend the appeal hearing in full. Hence they turned up only as it reached its conclusion.

Personally, I wish Amanda and her family well, and will continue to do so as long as they remain half as dignified as the Kerchers. Only time and the lure of big bucks will provide the answer to that one.

[Ally]

Yeah but considering that her parents apparently spent somewhat close to that in her defense and flying back and forth to Italy to be with her, renting an apartment, the father lost his job, etc...I don't think they are actually going to come out financially ahead.

[Garry Wroe]

I've always said is that if there were more serious consequences to being stupid, maybe people would quit being stupid. Hopefully it will work in Knox's case.

The difference being that Knox's stupidity will almost certainly lead to a million dollar book deal.

[Ally]

And of course, hopefully we in the world have learned a few lessons about buying into the media hype and continuing to cling to it, long after the evidence has proved otherwise.

I doubt it though.

[caz]

Well at least she's not serving life now, is she? But it was a close enough thing for her to have learned a few of life's harsher lessons.

Love,

Caz
X

[Abby Normal]

Hi Everyone,

Knox served time, in my opinion, for being her own worst enemy. She seemed to do everything in her power to put people's backs up. It shouldn't have made any difference to the professionals involved - the police, the lawyers, the forensic scientists et al - but even they are human, and juries are all too human. I'm not excusing anyone here, nor am I blaming Knox for being convicted of murder in the face of insufficient and/or flawed evidence.

But I still can't see why or how she dropped that innocent man in the poo, even under huge pressure to agree with what the police were suggesting about his involvement. You see, if she was not in the house that night and only found out what had happened to her housemate the morning after, she could not logically have testified that any specific individual was present, let alone involved. She totally dropped herself in the poo along with her bar boss, by saying she had heard Meredith screaming. If she had stuck to the 'truth' about not being there at all, but with her boyfriend in his flat all night, she could also have said, truthfully and logically, that she obviously had no clue as to who could have been involved, or how many, or if her boss had gone to that house or stayed in the bar.

Hearing the screams was the weirdest and daftest lie of all to tell, and absolutely not necessary, if she had no involvement whatsoever because she wasn't there and had no idea who was.

Any ideas, apart from the usual 'flustered and confused stoodent' argument?

Love,

Caz
X

False confessions/accusations under duress during interrogations are a known fact. This was a witchhunt from the start.

[Ally]

Fair enough, Ally.

We all live and learn.

Love,

Caz
X

I've always said is that if there were more serious consequences to being stupid, maybe people would quit being stupid. Hopefully it will work in Knox's case.

And so I am clear because I don't think I have been previously, I don't let Knox off the hook for her false confession. While I understand totally that it does happen, and even how it happens, and give some leeway to young people who have been trained to be submissive to authority figures, in the end, she was still responsible for her choices and for part of what happened to her.

I just don't believe that what she was undoubtedly guilty of: bad judgment, rank immaturity and gross stupidity was deserving of life imprisonment for murder.

[caz]

Fair enough, Ally.

If Knox's horrendous experience makes weak-willed students everywhere, with only a rudimentary knowledge of the language concerned, think twice before going abroad to study, it will probably be a good thing. Not for Knox, obviously, but for pretty much everyone else.

We all live and learn.

Love,

Caz
X

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[Ally]

But Caz,

Saying we are not talking about other cases but this one is impossible to accomplish. How do we know why Knox rolled any more than we know why those four navy men rolled. You somehow expect her to have a stronger psyche than anyone else on the planet and resist interrogation techniques that work to elicit false confessions in reported dozens of people?

Why would she do it? Why wouldn't she? If it works well enough that four men are capable of confessing and describing beating and raping a woman when it never happened, why would a woman be able to hold out in a foreign country with rudimentary knowledge of the language when she didn't even have an airtight alibi and had a hazy memory of the night in question due to being stoned?

Why would she confess? Because she's weak. Just like about 85 percent of the population.

In the case I mentioned every single man's confession contained details that the cops KNEW were untrue. They described beating the woman's face in and she had no facial bruising. They were proven liars by the physical evidence and their confessions were demonstrably NOT true but when a cop believes what he believes sometimes it doesn't really matter what the evidence says.

[caz]

I'm not talking about other weird cases, Ally, where people incriminate themselves and 'confess' to all sorts under pressure.

I'm talking about this one, and why Knox did her best to help seal her own fate by putting herself in the murder house while her housemate was being murdered, and hearing the screams. One can hardly blame the police for taking this at face value initially, and wanting to know what else she knew about what was going on, especially when she seemed to be confirming that a certain 'man of interest' was in the house with her and possibly responsible for those screams.

As soon as that man was able to prove he was elsewhere, the police could then hardly be blamed for demanding to know why she had lied and who she was covering for. The first thing they are going to think (in any country, at any time, about any crime) is NOT that the poor lamb was making up the bit about hearing the screams in addition to slandering her boss, because people under pressure have on occasion been known to do and say some mighty outlandish and eccentric things.

Love,

Caz
X

[Ally]

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200304/the-false-confession

http://truth.boisestate.edu/jcaawp/9901/9901.pdf

That one is a bit of a hard slog to go through, but you might find the section titled "Interrogative Suggestibility" on page 24 interesting. It matches fairly closely with what Knox reported.

John

John thanks for the link, I was looking for something similar and was coming up empty.

Just out of curiosity do you have a link somewhere to the pathology report by Lalli (translated of course). I had it a long while ago and can't remember where I got it from.

[John Hacker]

But I still can't see why or how she dropped that innocent man in the poo, even under huge pressure to agree with what the police were suggesting about his involvement. You see, if she was not in the house that night and only found out what had happened to her housemate the morning after, she could not logically have testified that any specific individual was present, let alone involved. She totally dropped herself in the poo along with her bar boss, by saying she had heard Meredith screaming. If she had stuck to the 'truth' about not being there at all, but with her boyfriend in his flat all night, she could also have said, truthfully and logically, that she obviously had no clue as to who could have been involved, or how many, or if her boss had gone to that house or stayed in the bar.

Hearing the screams was the weirdest and daftest lie of all to tell, and absolutely not necessary, if she had no involvement whatsoever because she wasn't there and had no idea who was.

Any ideas, apart from the usual 'flustered and confused stoodent' argument?

Heya Caz,

We don't really know what occurred at the interrogation as we should have. Although it was required by law to be recorded in this case it wasn't done.

Knox's version is that the police saw the text from Lamumba, assumed it meant there was a plan to meet and they attempted to get her to implicate him. The "scream" story allegedly came about when the police told her that they knew they were both there and asked her to imagine what had happened.

But of course we'll never know for sure.

We also know that false confessions happen all the time. Here's a couple of links that might interest you.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200304/the-false-confession

Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the number of false confessions nationwide, a review of one decade's worth of murder cases in a single Illinois county found 247 instances in which the defendants' self-incriminating statements were thrown out by the court or found by a jury to be insufficiently convincing for conviction. (The Chicago Tribune conducted the investigation.)

http://truth.boisestate.edu/jcaawp/9901/9901.pdf

That one is a bit of a hard slog to go through, but you might find the section titled "Interrogative Suggestibility" on page 24 interesting. It matches fairly closely with what Knox reported.

John

[John Hacker]

Chris,

There really isn't much more to be said about that blog. I think the 5 summary points in the report more then demonstrate what I was saying and focusing on the word "inadmissible" and it's timeline doesn't change that.

A more interesting question (to me) is this:

Given the experts report on the collection and analysis done on the knife, do you believe that it has any evidentiary value or be valid in court?

John

[Ally]

Hi Caz,

What I don't get, is why people think it's incredibly impossible for people, while under hours or rigorous investigation, to confess to whatever the police want to hear. Or why it has to be more than flustered and confused and one more of course....scared.

I have already put up a case in which four navy sailors ALL confessed to a crime that they did not commit. After the first one's DNA didn't match, the cop in charge much like here, decided on multiple people theory because he "knew" what had gone on, and coerced confessions from THREE more sailors, of all whom implicated other innocent men in their confessions and said it was a group rape. They ALL implicated the men the police pointed them to, and they all confessed FALSELY one despite having an airtight alibi (he still went to prison) and they all gave details of what the other men did that night in the rape and murder in their confessions. And just like Amanda, the next day after their head cleared they went...wait...what just happened.


All of those men gave bizarre stories and embellished greatly in their accounts describing things they weren't there to witness but "described" (imagined) in great detail, so I am not sure why you think it's so bizarre that Amanda "imagined" hearing Kercher scream. Why is it the weirdest and daftest lie of all? In their confessions, those four guys gave detailed images of raping a woman they'd never met and you think someone imaging a murder victim screaming is the weirdest lie? That's probably the most normal of things to invent in a murder scenario invention.

You may not understand how someone can break down under hours of rigorous testimony, falsely confessing and falsely accusing in the process, but the fact is, it happens, and it probably happens more than we know.